Gone Hollywood (yes, that one and the other one)

The creaky show-business maxim to never work with children or animals isn't easy to adhere to - or at least the former demographic isn't - when you write and direct a film in which the main character is a high school boy. But that is precisely what Brian Hecker, graduate of Attucks Middle and Hollywood Hills High, chose to do with his first feature, Bart Got a Room.

On an afternoon in late fall, day seven of a 20-day shoot, the Grand Ballroom at Weston's Hyatt Regency Bonaventure was crammed with people of all ages - but the youngest were the most difficult to keep under control when filming required absolute silence and/or long waits. "Quiet," and all synonymous entreaties, were virtually ignored by the kids, who were very, very excited to be in a room with William H. Macy - though most of them would probably have a hard time placing the Oscar-nominated actor if he hadn't co-starred in the hit family comedy Wild Hogs earlier this year.

The scene being shot is a lavish bar mitzvah; the extras were found at three local temples. "I called them all personally, every single one," said Brian's mother, Judy Hecker, a Hollywood resident who appears in many scenes throughout the film.

In fact, Bart Got a Room is a bit of Hecker family reunion, with immediate and extended kin placed in many small roles.

"It's kind of funny and embarrassing at the same time," Brian Hecker said. "Here I am trying to maintain some semblance of professionalism, and I've got the crew watching, and 150 extras, and I'm not really loving the placement of these particular extras in the distance, and I wanted them to move a few inches to the left, and I had to call out to everybody to have them move. . . . So there's something very awkward about saying, 'Uncle Robert! Can you move?' "

Awkwardness, however, appears to be a central theme.

"This is based on a real experience, this whole movie, about how there was all this pressure, all these external forces, to have a romantic experience at the prom," Hecker, 36, explained. "So, my best friend asked me to the prom, my best female friend, and I said no because I wanted to hold out. I asked a couple of girls, they rejected me, and I went back to my best friend and she was already taken."

Danny, Hecker's alter ego, is a senior at Hallandale Beach High School played by newcomer Steven Kaplan; Alia Shawkat, best known for the late sitcom Arrested Development, portrays his best friend. The titular Bart is a minor character who doesn't show up until the end of the movie: He's an "even bigger dweeb" than Danny, who manages to get both a date and hotel room for the prom, Hecker says. "When the dad hears that Bart got a room, that's the ultimate inspiration for him to help his kid."

Macy, wearing a somewhat comical bushy brown hairpiece that could accurately be described as a "Jew-fro," plays Danny's father, who is in the midst of a divorce from Danny's mom (Cheryl Hines, just off another fine season of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm). Also on set in Weston that day were a gaggle of students from West Palm Beach's G-Star School of the Arts, set to play fellow prom- goers for the movie's climactic event.

Not a charity project

The casting of Macy and Hines is part of what makes the filming of Bart Got a Room in Weston and Hollywood a noteworthy event; it's a real movie made by a real native, with real stars and a real budget. (Well, $1.5 million, but that's not unreasonably low for an independent film.) And while the actors have Florida ties - Macy was born in Miami, and his father lives in Gainesville; Hines is from Miami Beach, attended Florida State University and graduated from the University of Central Florida - they clearly don't see Bart Got a Room as some sort of charity project.

"It all comes down to getting a production company that really supports you and has the financing to have the agents of these actors take the project seriously," Hecker said. "It was really the biggest turning point when I had a company that had the money to make hard offers to actors." (His first choice for the father role was Danny DeVito, but, Hecker said, "I'm much happier with Macy; I actually think he gives that sort of edge to the project. . . . There's something about a Macy project that gets people's attention.")

Showbiz vet

The production company that enabled Hecker to score his attention-grabbing cast is Plum Pictures, whose John Cusack-starrer Grace Is Gone won the audience award and screenwriting prize earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Hecker's line producer, Peter Pastorelli, has worked on well-regarded indies including Trust the Man and Garden State. Like Hecker, Pastorelli favors jeans and baseball caps; they lend an air of boyish energy to the production.

But this is not, as some would put it, Hecker's first rodeo.

He turned to directing in college, after an adolescence spent acting - very successfully, if you listen to his perhaps slightly biased mom: "Everyone was talking about him, all over the United States, about how incredible he was." He received a film degree from Northwestern University in 1993, and although he was initially rejected for the graduate program at the prestigious American Film Institute, he got in two years later.

As he neared graduation, the school named him "Director of the Year" and he made an acclaimed short film, Family Attraction, for which he was able to attract Martin Sheen and the late Chris Penn. (It's available on iTunes for $1.99.)

That got the attention of Cathy Konrad, a thriving young producer working for Miramax. In the summer of 1998, the studio signed Hecker to a three-picture deal that garnered publicity in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He was set to direct a movie called Prom War.

But about six months later, Konrad (who recently produced Walk the Line) pulled up stakes at Miramax and went to Columbia Pictures. It was reported that she would continue work on a number of embryonic Miramax projects, including Prom War (as well as a sequel to The Commitments), but none came to pass.

No distributor yet

Now, nearly nine years later, Hecker - who cites among his influences David Mamet, James L. Brooks, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson - is finally getting to make his first feature. But there's no guarantee it will have a fairy-tale ending: Bart Got a Room does not yet have a distributor.

"Usually for films like this, you go to the big film festivals, you premiere at Sundance or Tribeca or Toronto, and you get the bidding war - that's the fantasy - from the major studios," Hecker said.

For now, though, the place for Hecker to be is here. With shooting complete, he and his editor are spending another 10 weeks in South Florida doing post-production, getting the movie ready for festivals.

Hecker said there was never any question about setting, and shooting, his movie in the place where he grew up.

"It was very important to me to keep the flavor" of South Florida, Hecker said. "I think some of the best independent films utilize the environment as a way to sort of create another character in the story. . . . It's hard to deny that the elements of the South Florida environment don't affect the way we go through our lives. From the retirement community that's around us and the sort of flatness, the expanse. There's a certain slow pace to South Florida that I think adds to some of the humor of the movie."

He went on to rhapsodize about specific aspects of the local culture: "The heat, and egrets, and lizards, and old people, and the early-bird special, and the pastel colors, and the blue skies and the white puffy clouds - it's become a mandate for my production designer and my cinematographer and myself to really preserve South Florida feeling in almost every frame."

Passionate sincerity

Just from observing the set for a few days, it's easy to assume Bart is a somewhat goofy comedy. But Hecker speaks about it with passionate - and very serious - sincerity.

"I have a lot of themes in my work about family, and the state of affairs as it pertains to the American family, and what constitutes a good relationship, and is it even possible today with so much societal pressure," he said.

"There's a certain expectation of what a relationship should be, and then there's the reality, and I think that gap is getting greater and greater. We're still holding on to these romantic ideals from an antiquated institution, an antiquated system. . . . This movie certainly kind of reflects that confusion, the quiet desperation of having an ideal in your head and just trying to play up to that ideal."

That doesn't mean, though, that the film is without laughs: "To me the best movies are funny throughout, but they really have this pain, this underlying pain that's happening," Hecker said. "When Harry Met Sally is such a great comedy, but there's a lot of desperation in the movie, there's a lot of pathos and emotional resonance."